The Nimble Collaboration: Fine-Tuning Your Collaboration for Lasting Success

By Karen Louise Ray

Let's face it, the collaboration process can be a pain in the neck. The Nimble Collaboration: Fine-Tuning Your Collaboration for Lasting Success, shows collaborations how to become leaner, more responsive, more flexible, and ultimately, more productive. In their bestselling book, Collaboration Handbook: Creating, Sustaining, and Enjoying the Journey, Michael Winer and Karen Ray describe how to form a successful collaboration. In The Nimble Collaboration, Ray guides existing partnerships into the next stage: becoming more effective. Part I presents the ""three Rs"" of nimble collaboration: results that are clearly defined, relationships that are deft, and a structure that is resilient. Readers will learn how to determine, describe, and evaluate the specific results everyone wants to achieveand keep them at the heart of each step they take. The book shows readers how to build trust, reinforce roles, and avoid turf issues and hidden agendas. Part II walks through real-life applications in two typical collaborations: service integration collaborations, and complex problem-solving collaborations. Detailed case studies demonstrate nimbleness in action and give collaborations concrete problem-solving ideas. Throughout the book are samples, examples, and how-tos based on the author's many years of experience consulting with real people in real collaborations across the United States. A special section explains how to write the various documents that bind partners together on paper, including a memo of agreement and a formal governance agreement. Collaborations that involve government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, community-building groups, nonprofits, law enforcement, education, health, housing, arts, social services, business, foundationyou name itwill find hands-on help for making their collaboration satisfying and productive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fieldstone Alliance
• Release date: Sep 15, 2002
• ISBN: 9781618588982

Book preview

Introduction

Collaborations Can Be Nimble

This book emerged from the experiences of people like you—people who take part in collaborations that are fraught with frustrations and rich with celebrations. For almost twenty years, I’ve been listening to collaboration partners ask themselves questions: What do successful collaborations do? Can partnerships be clever, agile, and responsive? Can we find effective ways to manage our work together and act quickly when we need to? As my colleagues and I found answers to these questions, we discovered that capable collaboration is not an oxymoron. The result is this book about constructing a particular kind of collaboration, one that is satisfying and productive. One that leads to systems change and engages its member organizations in reinventing themselves for the good of their customers and of their staff.

One adjective describes such remarkable collaborations: nimble. The American Heritage Dictionary defines nimble as Quick in movement or action . . . deft. The word nimble also implies cleverness in understanding, being flexible, and being responsive. I apply nimble to collaborations as follows:

The nimble collaboration is based on results that are clearly defined, relationships that are deft, and a structure that is resilient, leading to productive action.

Every sentence in this book is here for one reason—to help you nimble-ize your collaboration as quickly and efficiently as possible by focusing on the three Rs of nimble collaborations: results, relationships, and resiliency.

New Expectations Drive Collaboration

If you were part of an active collaboration ten years ago, you were an unusual person with unusual support from your boss or board. Ten years ago, collaborations were hard to start and even harder to keep up. They made individuals and organizations share information and work together in unusual ways.

Today, working in collaboration is considered a must for many organizations. Museums and galleries are working with government units to promote arts. Public health departments are providing services for children on elementary school campuses. Social services agencies are establishing offices in libraries. And foundations are investing in collaborations in order to push systems to change faster and wiser. Collaborations of different sizes and purposes exist in countless communities across the nation.

The reasons for collaboration are to achieve some result your organization cannot achieve alone, and to achieve that result in a complex environment. You can collaborate to

Respond to the requirements of a funder or a legal mandate that instructs you to work collaboratively.

Save money on back-office functions—for example, rent, technology, and support services such as accounting.

Better serve clients. Many collaborations are motivated by a desire to provide a more responsive set of products, or more culturally competent services, or to fulfill a neglected area of need.

Respond to a crisis, such as a flood, an act of terrorism, or a sudden acceleration of drug use among teens.

Improve a system. Unified case management, one-stop shopping for social services, and wrap-around services are all code phrases for improving a system’s ability to work more quickly, more creatively, or more cost-effectively.

Improve a community. Housing developers and cities redesign urban spaces, manufacturers and ecologists focus on clean water tables for several states at once, churches and schools promote cross-cultural respect.

Still, for many of us, the collaboration process is a pain in the neck. Collaboration can mean frequent, irritating meetings, arduous task completion, and snail-paced decisions. These challenges can slay collaborations that don’t pay attention to the new environment for collaboration.

Times have changed, and the barriers to collaborations that existed ten years ago have morphed. We’ve moved from a single question in the 1980s—Does collaborating make sense?—to a new set of constructs based on the answer, Yes. Collaboration can help agencies work together.

These new constructs include several lasting changes:

People expect seamless service across agencies and reduced barriers to making improvements in their lives and in their communities. People bring a consumer’s savvy to their service providers. Government agencies and nongovernmental organizations alike find that their clients are accelerating their access to services and demanding that the public sector behave and interact with them just as the business and private sector does. People once thought of as clients are thought of as service consumers, customers, and partners.

Professionals are tired of limited collaboration success. This happens when the lessons they learn and the improvements they birth fall by the wayside—because funding streams don’t keep up with changes in best practices. Too often the hard work it takes to build product or programming together gets abandoned because the partner organizations will not change their budgets to account for the new ways to provide service.

Community leaders want responsive systems that don’t duplicate effort or waste resources. For instance, the Office of Homeland Security was established (in part) to streamline information exchange among law enforcement agencies. Welfare reform has been driven by elected leaders who know collaborative services are easier for clients to access and thus result in better, faster outcomes for families.

In the light of these challenges, what does a collaboration need to do to be successful? How can collaborations attend to these challenges without collapsing under their weight? How can real people in real time start and maintain a systems change effort?

Four Stages in Starting a Collaboration

During the 1980s, the Wilder Foundation conducted international research on collaborations. Researchers identified factors that influenced successful collaboration, including mutual trust, multiple layers of decision making, open communication, and a skilled convener. These factors were identified in Collaboration: What Makes It Work.¹

Michael Winer and I incorporated this research into our own years of experience consulting with collaborations and subsequently created a model that describes the pattern of development in a collaborative effort. This model, outlined in detail in Collaboration Handbook: Creating, Sustaining, and Enjoying the Journey, has proved a worthy and reliable guide to identifying what’s going on in any start-up collaboration and how to help collaborative efforts move along more quickly.

We defined collaboration as a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more organizations to achieve results they are more likely to achieve together than alone.² We clarified the difference between cooperating, coordinating, and collaborating. Chapter One of this book reviews these ideas.

If you are just starting a collaboration or are participating in a relatively new one, work through the stages presented in Collaboration Handbook. By contrast, The Nimble Collaboration is intended for collaborations that have some basic experience and are ready to become nimble. This book does build on and incorporate the techniques suggested in Collaboration Handbook. Here is a brief review of the stages described therein.

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If you are just starting a collaboration or are participating in a relatively new one, work through the stages presented in Collaboration Handbook. By contrast, The Nimble Collaboration is intended for collaborations that have some basic experience and are ready to become nimble.

Basically, collaborations grow up through stages of development. During Stage One, the member organizations build a shared vision and describe specific results they want from their work. This builds the confidence the group needs to begin Stage Two: ironing out conflicts and working through trust issues. When this work is well along, group members naturally begin to focus more on how they can be successful together, and they enter Stage Three: piloting projects, evaluating results, and getting the word out to the community at large. During Stage Four, member organizations assess how they work together and what, if anything, is next. Often at this point they realize that somehow the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Enter the Nimble Collaboration

So why is collaborating so darn hard? There are many reasons. The four stages often unfold in fits and starts; some of the work in Stages One and Three often happens simultaneously; and some of the work in Stage Four needs to be considered while doing Stage One work.

The Nimble Collaboration anticipates this complexity. Sometimes partner organizations need to focus on process, sometimes on a task. Sometimes partners can see the big picture, the aha, this is how my organization needs to be different in order to be effective. And sometimes, talking about change is the last thing partners need to do.

This new book suggests ways to fine-tune your existing collaboration’s skills for handling complexity, and for making it more lean, more responsive, more flexible, and more productive—in a word, nimble. This book also explores what’s next for collaborations. While Collaboration Handbook explained ways to start a collaboration, The Nimble Collaboration is about ways to make an existing collaboration more effective. If you are already working in a nonprofit collaboration that involves government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, community-building groups, nonprofits, law enforcement, education, health, housing, arts, social services, businesses, foundations—you name it—then this book is for you.

Readers familiar with Collaboration Handbook, or collaboration in general, will find some ideas repeated here. The reason is simple: Given the complexity of collaboration, participants overlook some of the most basic steps at start-up, and these oversights turn into problems later in the life of the collaboration. Thus, part of the process of becoming nimble involves a return to basics. But beyond that, existing collaborations have issues that differ from start-up collaborations:

Continuously unproductive meetings

Changing representatives at meetings

Decisions that get made over and over again

Partners who are not accountable to one another

Conflicts that continue unresolved just under the surface

Partnerships that die when the funding runs out

Failure to embed best practices into the system

To become nimble, the collaboration needs to resolve these issues. And they can be resolved.

Nimble Collaboration Renews Institutions

Organizations that work together influence each other. Consider how your own role changes in the course of a collaboration: As you learn about what other organizations are doing, you rethink your own work. As you understand what the whole system looks like, you rethink your organization’s place in the system. Collaboration is the art of gracefully influencing others, and being influenced by them. You change your organization—that is, you renew it—through these influences. Mutual accomplishment and mutual organizational renewal are at the very heart of collaboration. While the goal of collaboration is not organizational renewal, such renewal is the inevitable (and happy) outcome of almost all successful collaborations.

Many organizations do not understand this inherent result of being part of a collaboration. Often, when your organization becomes a partner in a collaboration, you expect to change some other organization, or some system or problem other than your own organization. When you create a nimble collaboration, you change your operations, programs, and services. You stop thinking of the people you serve in terms of their experience with you; instead, you think of them in terms of their experience with the system. You influence other agencies to change, and you accept the feedback about changes you need to make. You change your financing and budgets to reflect what you learn about best practices and customer success. You look different in three years from how you looked at the start of the collaboration.

Many collaborations avoid this hard truth. They run the collaboration as a special project parallel to their individual organizations’ regular programming, never making the deep investments in organization renewal that the collaboration results suggest. They forget the reason they’re knee-deep in all the meetings and work: to improve the system for customers, users, clients, staff, and all other stakeholders. These organizations miss an extraordinary opportunity to renew themselves.

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When you create a nimble collaboration, you change your operations, programs, and services. You stop thinking of the people you serve in terms of their experience with you; instead, you think of them in terms of their experience with the system. . . .You look different in three years from how you looked at the start of the collaboration.

Paradoxically, although a lot of time is spent meeting with other organizations, much of collaboration is an internal affair involving the organization’s examination of itself. Each participating organization can reinvigorate itself by updating programs or promoting best practices in its products and services in light of what it has learned about the whole system. Many organizations sit down at the collaboration meeting table as a partner without doing the internal, private work back in their own offices. These organizations have not grasped the fact that to accomplish the goals of the collaboration, they will need to make some internal changes—that collaboration involves mutual institutional renewal.

What does the nimble collaboration do if one of the partners is not doing its internal work? The collaboration puts the problem on the agenda by calling for discussion from each of the partners about the progress of their agency’s reinvention. Institutional renewal cannot take place in an atmosphere of secrecy. In a nimble collaboration partners talk to each other about successes, stumbling blocks, doubts, and fears. Then they proceed with the important work of making each agency the best it can be for consumers. This book suggests many tactics you